1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to article handling and monitoring and, more particularly, to loading articles on one or more support surfaces with a mobile device and to monitoring the arranged articles before, during and/or after transportation of the loaded support surfaces.
2. Background Information
Transporting articles from one location to another is a common task undertaken by a majority of businesses and various other enterprises, and is sometimes generally referred to as “material handling”. The military and shipping services such as the U.S. Postal Service, FedEx® and the like, for example, utilize supply chains to pickup, transport and deliver various types of articles between different locations worldwide. The term “logistics” may be used to describe flow management of the articles and information for transporting, inventorying, warehousing, material handling and packaging of the articles within such supply chains.
Typical material handling and logistical tasks may include handling articles at their source, their destination and many points in-between. These tasks frequently involve packaging and/or repackaging a variety of articles into larger or smaller packages, pallets, containers and the like for shipping across a distance. These tasks may also involve unpacking the articles at their destination for storage, use, delivery or further transportation. Additionally, articles frequently are moved and stored at various places at various times within a particular building or group of buildings, such as in a manufacturing operation, hospital, or warehouse as well as an aircraft, ship, cargo plane or other military environment.
At their source, order picking (also referred to as “palletizing”) typically is employed in a warehouse or other location where a number of articles are taken from a number of source locations, such as pallets, for example, and placed on a destination or shipping pallet or other shipping container or the like. Once filled, the pallet or container is then taken to a loading dock or similar area where it may be packaged, such as with strapping, shrink wrap or the like, and loaded into a transport vehicle such as, for example, a truck, rail car, plane, helicopter, ship or other vehicle.
At their destination, the pallets or containers are removed from their transport vehicles. The articles may subsequently be removed from the pallets or containers and placed in another transport vehicle or another storage location for further shipment, storage or use. This process and associated tasks are routinely undertaken by businesses on a daily basis and are an integral part of providing cargo for private and military use in locations around the world and must be accomplished with a high degree of accuracy to avoid additional costs and to sustain or increase customer satisfaction.
In many operations, order picking and pallet or container unloading is performed using manual labor, which is not only time consuming and labor intensive, but is subject to errors and injury to workers particularly with heavier loads. Additionally, workers typically use various types of equipment to make such tasks easier, such as forklifts, pallet jacks and conveyor belts, for example, which not only require a substantial amount of capital for purchasing and maintaining such equipment but are limited in the environments where they can be employed and create serious safety hazards in the work environment.
Although automated systems have been developed, they typically are fixed installation types of systems that require a substantial amount of infrastructure installation and facility renovation and simply cannot be flexibly deployed in different warehouses, manufacturing facilities, planes, ships or other environments as needed. This required infrastructure and renovation not only dramatically increases the cost, complexity and maintenance of such systems, but also limits their application to large warehouses and operations with significant budgets. Additionally, if such systems go down for repair or maintenance the entire material handling operation is typically shut down if not significantly disrupted since those systems take up a substantial amount of floor space thereby inhibiting any backup systems from being employed, such as using forklifts or fork trucks, for example.
It would be desirable therefore to provide a readily deployable and near-zero infrastructure solution to the above and other needs.